an evening at Kilbeg Pier

I took a drive out to Kilbeg Pier on Lough Corrib the other afternoon. Didn’t exactly know where I was going, so of course I took a wrong turn and got lost at first. The second turn I took wasn’t right, either. Fun, cruising around the bohereens of County Galway… I managed eventually, thanks to a helpful road sign. Kilbeg Pier, it said. Should’ve looked for those a bit earlier, I think?

But anyway, it’s a lovely place. I’ll definitely go back there. Beautiful views of the Connemara mountains across the lake, and I was lucky that it was a beautiful sunset that evening. It had been fairly cloudy all day, and still was, but that only added to the moodiness.

It’s been very cold recently, and that day, there was still a little bit of ice on the shallow parts of the harbour, which made for really exciting photographs – cold, green-blue-ish ice, barely visible but in stark contrast to the red and orange of the setting sun.

I stopped these shots down with my 2-stop ND filter, and the P121 ND grad filter. What I’d originally wanted was that lovely washed-out soft water you get when leaving the shutter open a long long time, but it was too light still, and the 2-stop filter didn’t quite fit the bill. (Unfortunately, I don’t as of yet have another ND filter. I really must change that…)

But, despite the sort-of-failure with the filters (at least the ND grad did its job very nicely), I’m still very happy with the way these shots turned out.